Thanksgiving Abroad: Venice, the Last Place on Earth to Find a Turkey Dinner

Thanksgiving is a holiday associated with home, but not all Americans live in the 50 states. This week, we’re sharing tales (and recipes) of those Thanksgiving devotees who have made their meals abroad

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Venice, Italy, is one of my favorite cities, a place I’ve been lucky enough to visit twice. But the two concepts–because Venice, really, is as much hypothesis as metropolis–don’t really meet unless you count the Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who inspired Christopher Columbus, who inspired Europe to look at America and say, “Oh really,” leading eventually to Pilgrims, Plymouth Colony, and Marshmallow Fluff being plausibly served in vegetable casseroles.

Anyway, Venice is certifiably one of the last places on earth where you’d think of walking through a restaurant door and ordering a turkey dinner on the fourth Thursday in November. But that kind of logic is weak beer to my mother. My mother is from Chicago, city of optimists, and stubborn. In November 2007, my dad was required to go to Venice over Thanksgiving for a business meeting, and my mother decided, with all her Midwestern starch–and a two-for-one Swiss Air coupon–to join him and make it a destination holiday. In tow were my sister and a friend, and several aunts, uncles, and cousins who had heard the news and decided to hop abroad. Thanksgiving being nothing, really, without enough family around to field a football side.

At the time, my wife and I lived in Paris, where I had a job working in a French advertising agency. I also had several French colleagues, knowledgeable and well dressed and easy to provoke into battle, who thought I was insane to visit Italy, never mind its floating citadel of pristine fish, for a plate of turkey, or dinde, as they put it.

One cubicle-mate, Tomaso, an actual Venetian, insisted there was no way I’d find a dinde in Venice. I’d have to buy one in Paris–no simple task in itself–and smuggle it across the Alps, he said.

“And how do you plan to transport this turkey to Venice? By train?” Tomaso asked.Another colleague, Olivier, wondered if perhaps I owned a dinde-shaped suitcase.

Luckily, I’d saved the best part of the story for last. My mother, I told them, had in fact discovered a Venetian restaurant to roast us a turkey and provide the fixings–mashed potatoes, cranberries, and a dessert made from la zucca (Italian for pumpkin). It wouldn’t even be a hassle, the manager had said, since they prided themselves on being the rare restaurant in Venice to list no fish on the menu. Rather than plates of Adriatic gamberetti, wild boar.

Tomaso thought this very funny, a big joke. A Venetian restaurant that didn’t serve fish? I nodded. It sank, in and he looked affronted.

A minute later, Tomaso said to me tenderly, with real concern, “Believe me, Venice is not about having turkeys. You must be careful.”

As a child, I was bonkers for Christmas. The entire month of December, I couldn’t sleep at night from anticipation. Presents, Santa Claus, Claymation specials, the pervasive suburban pageantry. It all led to a depression on December 26 that was real and shoulder-aching, my tears fed by exhaustion and the shattering news–it really was news each time–that Christmas was again 364 days away.

Thanksgiving, our eminent moral holiday, doesn’t have much for children. At its heart are conversation, food, drink, and fellowship–all perks of adulthood. If you throw in sex, sports, and Homeland, as I imagine some families do, you’ve nearly got the whole of modern adult happiness. I was 23 when I learned how to cook; I grew up around the same time. It was precisely then that Thanksgiving started to mean something more. Growing up, Christmas was always about me, and eventually you, when I finally started to enjoy the giving part. But Thanksgiving is always about us.

At the Charles de Gaulle Airport, my wife and I were waiting for our flight to Venice when we caught a quick glimpse of America: several French people wearing tooled cowboy boots, Wrangler jeans, and white hats, standing in line for a plane bound for Dallas-Fort Worth. It wasn’t, in fact, a major shock. The folklore of cowboys is alive and well in Europe. And if the fantasy doesn’t include contemporary Wyoming subdivisions or Arizona border patrols, the re-enactors don’t seem too bothered.

After all, how long have we taught our children the myth of the American Indians and their European invaders sitting down together to break bread over pumpkin-spiced lattes?

Gondolas docked on a canal in the San Marco district at night (Credit: Christian Guy/Hemis/Corbis)

Our plane landed in the dark. The terminals sat on the mainland, near the water, with the city located about three miles out into the lagoon. We took the Alilaguna, a public transport boat, across choppy black water. Lights from distant buildings twinkled in the dark. Other boats passed us, taxis leaving Venice with their bows high up in the air. Venice proper is basically an encampment of homes and shops arrayed in ruffles of stone over more than a hundred interconnected islands. Suddenly we were there, in the maze of waterways. Grand mansions stood on sea legs, barely lit in the fog. We saw human shapes passing in and out of the light from streetlamps like so many dark fish. Gondolas bobbed in their moorings, covered with tarps for the night.

In that moment, it was amazing to me that more people don’t commit murder during their Venetian holiday just for the sheer atmosphere of it all.

The next morning, I was ready for turkey. But Venice had gotten its holidays mixed up: The city was decorated for Christmas. Shop windows strung with glass ornaments. A Christmas fair in the Campo Sant’Angelo, with Christmas lights glowing in the morning fog. Ominously, the air was also filled with sirens, like emergency church bells. Perhaps announcing the previous night’s body count? I wondered.

My dad said, “It’s acqua alta, high water.” A uniquely Venetian dilemma, he explained, where the lagoon floods the sidewalks, requiring tourists to stick to makeshift plywood walkways. Whereas the locals walked around in knee-high rubber boots for which they seemed a touch too smugly thankful.

But we were there to eat, not sightsee. I fasted all day to make room for dinner, even as we passed one shop after another full of delicious-looking food. Farmers’ markets selling apples and artichokes. Stacked trays in windows full of crayfish and crab. No turkeys that I noticed, but many people eating barely fried fritto misto, or hearty soups with clams. Back at the hotel, we changed clothes, meaning we put on more of them, the same way we did at home–ties and jackets, dresses and wraps; my family doesn’t sit down to Thanksgiving lightly–and tried to locate the restaurant, La Bitta, without getting lost.

People who have been to Venice will advise you to get lost, to wander aimlessly the city’s unlabeled cellular pathways. But that’s really no fun whatsoever when you’re late for a dinner reservation.

Thankfully, my father’s mental GPS operated at full strength. The osteria was found tucked away in the Dorsoduro, one of Venice’s more residential neighborhoods, and passing through a dark wooden door, we entered a small, homey restaurant, very warm with lots of wood, people laughing, and a shelf below the ceiling lined with grappa bottles. It not only felt like someone’s home, it felt like home idealized, like one you aspire to inhabit someday.

The owner, a gracious woman named Deborah, showed us to a small private room in the back. We drank cocktails, Venetian spritzes–white wine, soda, and Aperol. Soon platters began to arrive. That afternoon we’d joked about who would carve the turkey, but it came out pre-sliced and tasting, well, like roast turkey back home but with more rosemary and sage. Then came the mashed potatoes, pleasantly chunky. Sweet potatoes roasted and cracked open with a drizzle of olive oil. Cranberries, many other things I can’t remember, and also a platter of three different pastas. Of those I think I had fourths. I really was full of joy. I’m pretty sure one of the pastas included a walnut pesto; another was tortello stuffed with mushrooms, I think, but to be accurate we were into the wine at that point, and I had all the intelligence of a cow.

The meal lasted two hours. We enacted our family ritual, which is to go around the table, seat by seat, explaining what we’re thankful for. Remembering the dead, celebrating the living. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. There wasn’t even a single fight, despite the caffe corretto (espresso + grappa) that got passed around. At least, not one significant enough to result in someone being blacklisted.

Thanksgiving, it turns out, is portable. You don’t even need a dinde. The night before Thanksgiving, the night we arrived, one of my father’s coworkers had taken us for a gondola ride in the dark. He’d poled us across the Grand Canal, into a system of narrow waterways. After 20 minutes, switch-backing past people’s kitchen windows, we arrived at a bend in an alley of water where our gondolier stopped. He turned on his flashlight. On the wall beside us was a painting shimmering in the light, a fresco of a woman praying.

We didn’t say anything at all. It seemed the best way just then of giving thanks.